Don't Believe the Gripe:
The Death of the Death of the Death of the Death of Rock and Roll

Let's see now. Hem, haw. It was the worst year for music since,
er . . . 1995.

Guess that won't do, will it? Well, how about--gripe, mumble--it
was the worst year for guitar bands since . . . That's a peg, I
suppose. Since when, though? Make it 1990. It was in 1990,
according to a widely cited Billboard article, that for the first
time in the post-Beatle era not a single "rock" album hit No. 1,
although due to the failure of vaginas to remind Billboard of
Jimi's axe, appropriately arranged efforts by Bonnie Raitt and
Sinéad O'Connor failed to qualify. Not coincidentally, 1990 was
also the year the ground-breaking rappers M.C. Hammer and Vanilla
Ice enjoyed their long, silly No. 1 runs. And soon an unknown band
from Seattle would usher in a new boom cycle for both the music
business and electric guitars. Which brings us to the 1996 bust.
Which was real. Right?

Right. The 1996 Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll extends the 1995
trend in which the disruptive mix-and-match sampling techniques
originally naturalized by hip hop made more waves than the
guitar-powered aftershocks of grunge. And this aesthetic development had
a commercial correlative. As the Times was so shocked to report,
1996 was indeed the year in which new rock product by such
designated sure shots as R.E.M., Pearl Jam, and Hootie & the
Blowfish failed to attract consumers in the vast numbers the
industry had projected, or wished, inspiring much millenarian
blather in its retail sector. Of course, as anyone who read
Billboard was aware, retail was showing signs of pie-eyed
overexpansion and overdue shakeout even during the boom. Moreover,
the headlined downturn wasn't in revenues per se, which continued
to rise slightly, but in the steep growth curve of recent years, an
unnatural trajectory many attribute to recycled CD catalogue. And
anyway, plenty of voters would argue that what's bad for the music
business is good for music. Still, I take the slumplet seriously,
not just because I suspect that the diminished seed money it
portends is a bad thing, but because after working all my life to
get respect for popular music, I believe popularity is a good
thing. Decades of Iron Butterflys, Osmonds, Journeys, and Celine
Dions have yet to spoil my delight in the risk and mess it entails.

Pazz & Jop generally takes a healthy interest in sales,
honoring hits of quality more often than not, and although Johnny
Huston huffs that the widely acclaimed winner of our 23rd or 24th
poll isn't "the King of America," merely "the 100th highest-selling
album artist of the year," the going-on-platinum sales of Beck's
Odelay put it in the black even by today's advance-bloated
standards. Nevertheless, we believe we're onto something that
abides after profits have turned to fertilizer: truth and beauty,
justice and pleasure, Art, the Mattering. Few of us are disquieted
by the far scanter sales of the 1995 winner, PJ Harvey's To Bring
You My Love, or the drastically lower 1993 numbers of Liz Phair's
Exile in Guyville, and we're kind of proud that Hole's now-platinum
Live Through This had barely reached gold when the ballots went out
in 1994. So whether or not Polly Harvey's music is ever taken up by
the so-called mass audience, we believe it will be remembered as
intensely as that of her superstar stablemates in U2, who are also
admired by a good chunk of the electorate (and will still be after
their designated sure shot, hopefully entitled Pop, fails to save
Strawberries from Chapter 11 in 1997). And we know from experience
that the poll is an excellent if hardly foolproof indicator of
potential fan appeal.

Yet if some sort of sea change toward soundscape feels like
what's happening, when I got all right-brained and examined the
numbers, what they presaged for guitar bands began to seem pretty
complicated. To start with, definition is tricky. We clearly can't
limit the concept to "alternative" when artists like Guns N' Roses
and Richard Thompson live off it. [File Under Prince] has to count
even if Guy and Tony Toni Toné and the once seminal guitarist
Curtis Mayfield do not; latter-day honky-tonkers like Dwight Yoakam
and Jimmie Dale Gilmore qualify even if Rick Rubin-era Johnny Cash
is as folk as Ani DiFranco and The Ghost of Tom Joad. Amy Rigby
counts the way Bonnie Raitt does, and so does Iris DeMent, by just
a hair this time; austere Gillian Welch does not. And folkie-with-a-sampler
Beck, resented in some quarters for putting new juice in
a white fanboy form, obviously presents a big problem. But if I'm
wrong to rule that Odelay and Mellow Gold aren't guitar-band
albums, for reasons I'll explain later, that has no effect on my
conclusion, which is that Gibson and Fender needn't downsize quite
yet.

In this decade, the worst poll year for guitar bands was the
aforementioned 1990, which was also a good one for rappers somewhat
more durable than Hammer and Ice--the likes of A Tribe Called
Quest, 18th that year and 87th this, and Digital Underground, whose
best-remembered contribution to the hip hop weal will probably end
up Tupac Shakur, two crews now victimized as much by their
audience's appetite for fad and progress as by any dropoff in their
own abilities. But ironically, as the saying goes, 1990's 19 sets
of axemen--sole women: the Kims Gordon and Deal on bass, Georgia
Hubley on drums--were led by a triumphant Neil Young & Crazy Horse,
whose Ragged Glory inspired our cover line: "Guitars: Live and
Memorex." Subsequently, guitar bands have charted a high of 27
finishers, in 1992, and a low of 23, in all three Pazz & Jops since
1994, which was also the year of Green Day and Soundgarden and a
top five that went Hole-Pavement-R.E.M.-Nirvana-Young. And the
numbers remain stable when you focus on futures. Narrowing the
definitions to favor classic garage-band configurations, filtering
out the varied likes of Rigby, the Mavericks, and the eternal
Alanis Morissette, you find that seven previously uncharted guitar
units made our top 40 in '94, nine in '95, and eight in '96.

This bean-count bears out what ought to be obvious: not only
won't the dominant musical sound of the second half of the 20th
century disappear overnight, but that magic twanger is likely to
enjoy a maturity so active it will seem oppressive to the prophets
of electronica, already impatient for a historical moment that's
sure to take a form they can't predict. The gender barrier is
permanently breached; for the nonce, it's much higher in techno.
And partly as a result, although the simple pressure of history
(including technological change) is the biggest factor, the guitar
band's aural profile will continue to expand and evolve, just as
the horn section's did between Sousa and Ellington, and just as
guitars themselves have since 1955, when Chuck Berry and Buddy
Holly and not so many others turned Chicago blues into pop, through
the '60s, when guitars actually took over, through metal and punk
and more metal and grunge and, whatcha wanna bet, more metal after
that. And through plenty of other stuff, too.

But a closer look at the beans reveals that the electronicats
aren't just whistling "Born Slippy." For starters, there's funny
stuff going on with Pazz & Jop's rookies. Anomalously in an era
when baby bands hone their skills with indie farm teams before
going national, most of 1995's scored with debut albums, as the
irrepressible biz-wise opportunists of Foo Fighters, Garbage, and
Elastica concocted professional pop from the grunge
aesthetic/moment and Uncle Tupelo bifurcated into down-to-earth
Wilco and miasmic Son Volt. Maybe the opportunists are career
artists, as they say over in a&r. But the careers in question seem
pathologically dependent on catchy singles, a malady almost as
fatal (you die of the cutes, humming uncontrollably, Day-Glo puke,
it's awful) as the dread Alternian texturitis (for those who desire
a dignified death). And in 1996, with our singles chart sporting a
fresh crop of alternanovelties, Eels and Primitive Radio Gods where
once Filter and the Presidents of the U.S.A. stood, all but two of
our album newcomers reversed the pattern of the previous years by
squeezing in on the low end, 24-29-34-35-38. This suggests some
combination of diminished critical interest and attenuated talent
pool. Whatever you think of Robert Schneider's weirdo
brainchildren, you have to admit that Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia
Tremor Control lack the ambitious sweep of the opportunists. Don't
you?

So then. Perhaps it's time to ac-cent-tchu-ate the
progressive. Having debuted at No. 2 in 1995, the bummed-out
mixmaster Tricky wasted no time placing a still bleaker follow-up
and his Nearly God guest-victim project in the top 20. Easier on
the soul and meatier for the right side of the brain was
Endtroducing . . . DJ Shadow, U.S.-released mid-November by a young
Californian so out of step Stateside that he had to go to London to
get a rep, which finished all the way up at fourth after barely
creasing premature competing polls. With Goldie polishing his
Metalheadz and L.T.J Bukem shunted over to a P&J compilation chart
I hope isn't embryonic forever, these two artists represented the
legible edge of soundscape in 1996. Tricky was felt and
phantasmagoric, Shadow in control of the kind of macrostructures
rarely noticed by the voters, who end up depending as much on songs
as Alanis and Gwen--a pop predilection that is the secret of their
oracular powers. Whether Tricky and Shadow have a growth curve in
them remains to be determined. But simply by taking electronica to
a recognizable formal conclusion, they gave lots of nonspecialists
the touch of strange they craved while preparing them for further
developments.

And after that there's, well, there's Stereolab seventh and
Everything but the Girl 12th. These finishes thrilled my advisors,
and I was gratified if hardly surprised by the forward motion they
signified. I just wish I was convinced it wasn't lateral motion.
Early proponents of the alternaesthetic in which texture fills in
for tune, EBTG have been around longer than, I don't know,
Screaming Trees, and Ben Watt's drum 'n' bass doesn't enliven Tracy
Thorn's sad croon any more decisively than his protoloungecore used
to. So it isn't that history has caught up with them, it's that
they've finally found their retro-with-a-twist niche, and could
they have cocktail onions with that? As for the blithe Marxists of
Stereolab, I'm down with their newfound knack for splitting the
difference between class war and Wrigley commercial, but weightwise
it turns them into Fountains of Wayne with a chick singer and
longer songs. Once again no future, except perhaps in its synthy
wink at the triviality it embraces with such post-Fordist savoir-faire,
a fun quality few of us would call--and though I hate to put
it this way, what else can I say?--revolutionary. P.S.: Something
similar goes for their culture-bending sisters in Cibo Matto, who
signify their commitment to innovation by hanging out in the right
neighborhood.

It's not my (primary) purpose to make fun of an honorable
record I don't happen to care for and a likable one that wears its
limitations on its insert. I'm just trying get a grip on the latest
death-of-rock rumor, which I'll call the fifth--1959 ("the day the
music died"), 1968 (nobody believes me now, but it was the talk of
the town; Esquire assigned a story, then axed me when I came up
with the wrong answer), 1977-79 (disco), 1990 (see above), and
1996. This is a conservative count, of course--every year, every
month, artistic malcontents broadcast obituaries for whatever genre
isn't ringing their chimes or providing the wealth and fame they
know to be their due. So at this late date I trust my skepticism is
understandable. It could actually be, as is oft conjectured, that
mindless pop pap--not the Cardigans, but poor Gwen Stefani--has
already replaced dire pseudoalternative bellyaching in the hearts
and minds of the 18-24s the biz dotes on. But that isn't what we
care about. If Nirvanamania was a fluke, well, who expected
anything better after Kurt died? Having survived Journey and
Michael Bolton (on the same label, yet never seen on the same stage
at the same time!), we can certainly survive No Doubt and even
Celine Dion. The question is what music will get us through--if
any.

As it happens, I haven't been much of a "rock" guy myself of
late. Looking over a decade's worth of top 10s, I find that till
this year only in 1994, with grunge rampant and hip hop and Afropop
losing savor, did more than half my faves qualify; usually the
figure has been three or four. Although this year's
six-by-just-a-hair--Rigby, Fluffy, Sleater-Kinney, DeMent, Los Lobos,
Nirvana--all got to me immediately, the basic guitar-band format has become
so familiar that even the ones I end up enjoying (Girls Against
Boys, Sebadoh, the glorious Imperial Teen) can take forever to show
me their tricks. Since I disdain the marginal differentiations
fanzines are created for, demanding nothing less than true sonic
distinction--which often just means astutely produced tune-and-voice
combos like Sebadoh's or Fluffy's, but sometimes inheres in
interplay like Imperial Teen's, and when the right lyric grabs me
by the earlobe I come back for more--you'd think stuff would sink
in faster. But for me as for most people, diminished expectations
do turn into self-fulfilling prophecies over time. And it's that
formal satiety--often combined with the nervous compulsion to
maturity that afflicts not-so-recent college grads as their
liaisons turn into relationships and their jobs evolve willy-nilly
into careers--that leaves smart young-adult rock and rollers hungry
for new. Thing is, this is as true of artists as of fans. Sometimes
they're merely worried about their continued marketability. But
they didn't become musicians to get bored.

With that in mind, ask yourself how many of P&J's 23 rock acts
seem comfortable with the accepted parameters of the form?
Musicmeisters R.E.M. and tastemeister Joe Henry working New South
neotraditionalism; guitarmeister Richard Thompson on his half-acoustic
little double-CD and songmeisters Wilco claiming every
parameter they can think of on theirs; reformed country phenom
Steve Earle and unretiring grande dame Patti Smith; Sheryl Crow
cognizing aural dissonance; Rigby and DeMent with bigger fish to
fry; and grunge patriarchs Soundgarden and Screaming Trees, whose
big-rock moves are the most conventional pieces of music in this
year's top 40. And while quite a few of these artists mean to break
molds (with virtuosity, passion, whatever), the list of those who
already have only starts with [File Under Prince]: Sleater-Kinney
storming the castle like Nirvana before them; Sebadoh and Imperial
Teen playing Marco Polo in the moat; Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia
Tremor Control throwing poop on their toy songs; arena-ska Sublime
and rap-metal Rage Against the Machine; Jon Spencer avant-travestying
da blooze; popmeisters Pulp reigning over a United
Kingdom in which dance beats come as naturally as wanking; and the
magisterial old cross-culturalists of Los Lobos sampling rhythms
and styles live as well as sounds and atmospheres DAT. Obviously
these groupings array themselves on a continuum, not in polarity,
with the daring of individual transgressions subject to dispute.
But to me they make clear that as it generated the inevitable
epigones and deracinations, Nirvanamania opened things up even
further than outside forces would have opened them up anyway.

And then there are the artists for whom a received form is a
shot in the arm, mother's milk, life itself. Distinguishing between
emergent culture, the shock-of-the-new malcontents crave, and
residual culture, the old-fashioned staples they resent, Raymond
Williams pointed out that the residual is often antihegemonic,
affirming values the arbiters up top have cost-cut to pieces. This
mechanism is regularly activated when the disenfranchised seize
their expressive destiny, as in the P&J counterpart to all the
women who took over the Billboard charts in 1996, the three
lesbians and one housewife who staged two of the most startling
rushes in P&J history--third-place Sleater-Kinney and eighth-place
Amy Rigby, who handicapped to come in around 20th and 35th on their
tiny labels. Compared to Nirvana's, Sleater-Kinney's moldbreaking
seems midcontinuum, their less disruptive chops knocking down
everything in the music's path on the strength of a resolve whose
steadiness never diminishes its intensity, while all Rigby wanted
from her producer was articulate settings for her naturalistic
lyrics and tunes, which is all he provided. People who just don't
get these records attend to the instrumentation and say what's the
big deal. But rather than political correctness or some such
canard, what propelled them so high was reliable usages imbued with
new needs--an urge to grow up without blowing up, an urge to hold
fast without getting stuck to the floor. And each of these was
conveyed by the one musical element no inanimate device has yet
generated: the human voice.

Voices are almost as personal in the reception as the
production, and on both ends too many alt types so detest Michael
Bolton that they've learned to do without what are narrowly
designated strong ones. Voice is why Iris DeMent improved her 1994
showing on a robust album cynics found preachy, and because it's so
personal, it's also why devotees love Cassandra Wilson's midnight
drift and I don't. The poll honors a few great voices--[File Under
Prince] again, and having wearied of poor Eddie Vedder, some would
now add Mark Lanegan--plus, as always, a great many canny singers.
But it's our two dark horses who make me wonder whether pipes could
be making a comeback with a constituency deeply suspicious of their
penchant for corn. Corin Tucker's power contralto (underpinned by
Carrie Brownstein's power screech) is why so many skeptics quickly
get Sleater-Kinney, and as a guy who kept playing Rigby's record
well after he could sing along with the year's sharpest lyrics, I
can attest that it isn't her words that carry the music, but how
warmly they quaver around proper pitch.

What strikes me about Rigby and Sleater-Kinney is that they
resist the trend in which four of the five top albums (counting Los
Lobos's Tchad Blake connection) are sample-dependent: the most
purportedly direct musical-emotional expression up against self-consciously
recombinant bricolage. I wish I wasn't obliged to point
out that such alternatives aren't mutually exclusive: Shadow topped
my list, Rigby ran a strong second. And the finest thing I can say
about our sweeping winner is that he doesn't think anything
excludes anything. I don't count Beck as guitar-band, even though
he fronts one on stage and plays the appropriate instruments in the
studio, for the simple reason that he wants out the way [File Under
Prince] wants in. His legal ID says folkie, but he manifests no
more and no less fealty to that niche than to alt-rock, hip hop, or
avant-garde--or, let us not forget, biz.

Beck won big, not spectacularly. Only the third victor to earn
more points than the Nos. 2 and 3 albums combined, he was also the
third straight--as critics' polls proliferate, a certain lemming
effect sets in. His 47 per cent mention on 236 ballots (with the
Voice between music editors, our turnout was the lowest of the
'90s) hadn't been equalled since the '80s, when Prince and Bruce
batted over .500 and Michael J. came close, and I know because
several letters said so that a few fans who counted him a shoo-in
threw their support to beloved longshots instead. There is an
obverse, however. Calculated lowballing is no doubt one reason for
how few points Odelay amassed from all those voters, only 10.3 per
mention, a dropoff of a full half-point from the previous low,
Arrested Development in 1992 (which I trust is now recognized as a
duty pick, a suggestion that outraged its supporters at the time).
But by way of comparison, 1994 sure shots Hole averaged 12.8 points
per mention, 1995 sure shot PJ Harvey 12.4, and both inspired
outpourings of hyperbole, while (as with Arrested Development)
Beck's written support was surprisingly querulous. Since Odelay
ended up sinking to 16 on my list, sounding pretty cold up against
the goofy glow and slacker specificity of Mellow Gold--not to
mention the funny flow and pan-African seriousness of the Fugees, who
confounded duty and pleasure so sweetly and militantly that
troubled hip hop ideologues still don't know what to make of them--I
infer that, like myself, many of the winner's more detached
supporters wondered whether there was enough there there. Protean
and incandescent cut by cut, Odelay means by not meaning--it
fetishizes indirection, which becomes simultaneously rational and
huggable when couched in its song forms. For the old alternakids
who love the record this strategy is mother's milk, soy milk,
malted milk, and a shot of good Scotch combined. But it makes mere
admirers itch.

Yet because I respect Beck, enjoy Beck, and like Beck, I have
little doubt that he's humane enough to rectify this absence. I
know the prophets among us think his samples are far too jokey and
catch-as-catch-can, a rockist insult to the whole-universe
soundfields they can hear with their body's ear in the latest
techno subsubgenre, and they're onto something--hearing, seeing,
feeling Spring Heel Jack spin in October was a trip I hope to
repeat. But the predictive power of the utopian folderol rock and
roll has been fending off since the '60s is so risible by now that
I refuse to waste space on the argument. Extreme states of
consciousness are for extremists, and one reason popularity is such
a good thing is all the mad visions and overpowering emotions
ordinary music lovers get to put to ordinary use. I hope Tricky and
Shadow's growth curve leads us all the way up the mountain, where
wizards unknown await. But most of those you read about in the
funny papers are apprentices at best.

I began 1996 with dire predictions about the future of music,
and I take exception to (or maybe just don't get) much of this
year's top 40--e.g., the pleasantly pleasureless Gillian Welch; the
politely literary Joe Henry; the archly boho Cibo Matto; Maxwell
expiring of Afrocentric texturitis in that midway spot on the poll
reserved in past years for such dance/r&b as Lisa Stansfield, Seal,
En Vogue, Tony Toni Toné, and (here's a clue) D'Angelo; the Roots
proving that good intentions aren't enough even if you throw in a
human beatbox; and, saints preserve us, future Sleater-Kinney
tourmate Jon Spencer. But many of these are what I call Neithers
rather than Duds, and it could have been a lot worse. The deadly
Tortoise foundered in a 41-50 that went Lovett-Dr.
Octagon-Reed-Chesnutt-Germano-Girls Against
Boys-Tortoise-Metallica-Cardigans-Fluffy (!).
Aimee Mann was 74th, Dirty Three 87th; there were only
two votes for Grant Lee Buffalo. The winner in the sadly
unenthusiastic singles balloting was at least a dance ditty as dumb
and wondrous as "Macarena" itself. And with the inability of the
biz to repackage its history in perpetuity causing as much
financial distress as Pearl Jam's refusal to make videos, at least
the uncanonical surprise winner of our reissues ballot is a
galactic titan. Thank heavens for Sun Ra--he could have been
Esquivel.

I was encouraged too by the return of political complaint--Iris
DeMent and Zack de la Rocha, Lauryn Hill and Corin Tucker--and
note once again that the quality and effectiveness of the ideas
matter less than the felt need to express them. This is Art, folks.
One would like it to have social consequences and is certain that
one way or another it will, but Art is where those consequences
begin. That's why, in the end, I find I don't much care whether the
biz booms or busts. If it booms we get some kind of '60s-style mass
mess, with crazies and communicators expanding and compromising
their reinvested emotions and their glimpses of the next world; if
it busts a narrower subculture addresses the same issues in much
the way Amerindie did in the '80s. There's worthy music down both
forks--a futurism that isn't suckered by folderol counterbalanced
against an eagerness to reconstitute traditions it would be dumb to
throw out with the bongwater. Not what I dream, not what you dream,
but what is? For a holding action in what could have been a dismal
time, it will definitely keep me hanging on.